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Monday, June 06, 2011

Paul Craig Roberts and Sibel Edmonds

On her podcast former interpreter Sibel Edmonds interviews former economist Paul Craig Roberts. Neither has much credibility at this point to begin with, but they actually manage to undermine what little they had. Roberts rants on for several minutes on the Osama bin Laden killing, amazingly arguing that it was not believable that the Navy SEALS could have engaged in a 40 minute firefight with bin Laden without "suffering a scratch". Nevermind that the 40 minutes is how long they were on the ground total, the firefight itself was only part of that, there is also the the fact that SEALS are pretty damn good at what they do. If they visit you in the middle of the night, the odds are you will lose. Then to get even more bizarre he argues that we should just "cut off any movement in, and any movement out" and wait for bin Laden to surrender so we could interrogate him.

Gee, I can't see any problems with that approach...

Anyway in response to Roberts' claim that al Qaeda was made up by the CIA, Edmonds insists that none of the translators at the FBI had heard the term before 9/11:

But these language specialists, these are people with Top Secret clearances they said that they never dealt with anything that had al Qaeda in it. This group included all the FBI’s language specialists who had been there for 15 years, 10 years, 20 years never dealt with the name al Qaeda before September 11th.

OK, well aside from the fact that these were FBI translators, not foreign intelligence specialists for the CIA or NSA, so it is entirely possible they did not come across it in their official duties, I seriously doubt that Islamist sleeper agents in Florida are going to send e-mails with "al Qaeda" in the signature line, it is just silly to pretend that this was a post-9/11 creation. In fact it was in common usage before 9/11, even by people who were not Arabic language specialists. I first heard the term in 1998 while watching a documentary on Osama bin Laden. 9/11 Myths has a partial line up here.

5 Comments:

Roberts rants on for several minutes on the Osama bin Laden killing, amazingly arguing that it was not believable that the Navy SEALS could have engaged in a 40 minute firefight with bin Laden without "suffering a scratch"

"But these language specialists, these are people with Top Secret clearances they said that they never dealt with anything that had al Qaeda in it. This group included all the FBI’s language specialists who had been there for 15 years, 10 years, 20 years never dealt with the name al Qaeda before September 11th."

So after the two African Embassy bombings, and the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen none of the FBI's translators had seen anything with the name "Al Qaeda" in it?

"Roberts rants on for several minutes on the Osama bin Laden killing, amazingly arguing that it was not believable that the Navy SEALS could have engaged in a 40 minute firefight with bin Laden without "suffering a scratch""

This goes to the root failure of the troofers - citing bogus reportin as fact.

The fact is that USSOCOM hasn't released a detailed account of the raid, in fact they haven't said ANYTHING. Since the raid whatever "details" have come from third-hand sources and retired government officials. Nobody with actual knowledge of the raid has said a thing, and they won't for some time.

This is just like the troofers citing initial accounts reported in the early hours after the attacks of 9/11 (dancing Jews in NJ, no Jews in the WTC during attack, explosions from inside the towers, etc) that have long since been retracted as bogus, or explained as confusion.